in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and men wrote with type writers, the language of the office memo was studded with abbreviations: "re:," " " " F Y I "" L ".c " 1 " d cc., ... uv lor ove ates from 1898; "thanx" was first used in 1936. 'Wassup," Crystal notes, originally appeared in a Budweiser commercial. @(--- ' --- '--- is something that E. E. Cummings might have come up with. S till, despite what they say, size mat- ters. A trillion of anything has to make some change in cultural weather patterns. T exting is international. It may have come late to the United States be- cause personal computers became a rou- tine part of life much earlier here than in other countries, and so people could e-mail and Instant Message (which shares a lot of texting lingo). Crystal provides lists of text abbreviations in eleven lan- guages besides English. And it is clear from the lists that different cultures have had to solve the problem of squeezing commonly delivered messages onto the cell-phone screen according to their own particular national needs. In the Czech Republic, for example, "hosipà' is used .c " LI . . "" 1 ' lor nOvno S1 pamatuJu: can t remem- ber anything." One can imagine a wide range of contexts in which Czech texters might have recourse to that sentiment. French texters have devised "ght2v1," which means '1 ai acheté du vin." In Ger- many, "nok" is an efficient solution to the problem of how to explain "Nicht ohne v d "" . h d " If I\.on om - not WIt out con om. you receive a text reading" aun" from the fine Finnish lady you met in the air- port lounge, she is telling you ''Äiä unta nää "-in English, "Dream on." But the lists also suggest that texting has accelerated a tendency toward the Englishing of world languages. Under the constraints of the numeric-keypad tech- nology, English has some advantages. The average English word has only five letters; the average Inuit word, for exam- ple, has fourteen. English has relatively few characters; Ethiopian has three hun- dred and forty-five symbols, which do not fit on most keypads. English rarely uses diacritical marks, and it is not heavily in- flected. Languages with diacritical marks, such as Czech, almost always drop them in text messages. Portuguese texters often substitute "m" for the tilde. Some Chi- nese texters use Pinyin-that is, the prac- tice of writing Chinese words using the Roman alphabet. But English is also the language of much of the world's popular culture. Sometimes it is more convenient to use the English term, but often it is the aes- thetically preferred term-the cooler ex- pression. T exters in all eleven languages th C alli " II "" "" b b " d at ryst sts use 0, u, r, an "gr8," all English-based shorthands. The D h " 2 " " " h utc use m to mean tomorrow; t e French have been known to use "now," which is a lot easier to type than" mainte- nant." And there is what is known as "code-mixing," in which two languages- one of them invariably English-are con- flated in a single expression. Germans write "mbsseg" to mean "mail back so schnell es geht" ("as fast as you can"). So texting has probably done some damage to the planet's cultural ecology, to lingo- diversity. People are better able to com- municate across national borders, but at some cost to variation. T he obvious appeal of texting is its speed. There is, as it happens, a Ten Commandments of texting, as laid down by one Norman Silver, the author of "Laugh Out Loud :-D." The Fourth of these commandments reads, "u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt &2 reev." This is the new decorum in communication: you can be sloppy and you can be blunt, but you have to be fast. To delay is to dis- respect. In fact, delay is the only disre- spect. Any other misunderstanding can be cleared up by a few more exchanges. Back when most computing was done on a desktop, people used to com- plain about how much pressure they felt to respond quickly to e-mail. At least, in those days, it was understood that you might have walked away from your desk. There is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone. "I didn't have my phone": that just does not sound believable. Either you are lying or you are depressed or you have something to hide. If you re- ceive a text, therefore, you are obliged instantaneously to reply to it, if only to confirm that you are not one of those people who can be without a phone. The most common text message must b " k " I " I h h . e . t means ave not Ing to say, but God forbid that you should think that I am ignoring your message." The imperative to reply is almost addic- tive, which is probably one reason that texting can be not just rude (people continually sneaking a look at their cell phones, while you're talking with them, in case some message awaits) but deadly. It was reported that the en- gineer in the fatal Los Angeles com- muter-train crash this fall was texting seconds before the accident occurred. The Times noted recently that four of ten teen-agers claim that they can text blindfolded. As long as they don't think that they can drive blindfolded. A less obvious attraction of texting is that it uses a telephone to avoid what many people dread about face-to-face exchanges, and even about telephones- having to have a real, unscripted conver- sation. People don't like to have to per- form the amount of self-presentation that is required in a personal encounter. They don't want to deal with the facial expressions, the body language, the obligation to be witty or interesting. They just want to say "flt is lte." T exting is so formulaic that it is nearly anony- mous. There is no penalty for using catchphrases, because that is the ac- cepted glossary of texting. C. K. Ogden's "B asic English" had a vocabulary of eight hundred and fifty words. Most texters probably make do with far fewer than that. And there is no penalty for abruptness in a text message. Shortest said, best said. The faster the other per- son can reply, the less you need to say. Once, a phone call was quicker than a letter, and face-to-face was quicker than a phone call. Now e-mail is quicker than face-to-face, and texting, because the respondent is almost always armed with his or her device and ready to reply, is quicker than e-mail. "For the moment, texting seems here to stay," Crystal concludes. Aun, as the Finns say. It's true that all technology is, ultimately, interim technology, but text- ing, in the form that Crystal studies, is a technology that is nearing its obso- lescence. Once the numeric keypad is replaced by the QWERTY keyboard on most mobile messaging devices, and once the capacity of those devices in- creases, we are likely to see far fewer ini- tialisms and pictograms. Discourse will migrate back up toward the level of e-mail. But it will still be important to reach out and touch someone. Nok, though. Danke. . THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 20, 2008 87